Brian Proffit interviewed Matt Chandler, senior pastor of The Village church in Highland Village and Denton, Texas. Matt led the church through sweeping changes that have seen them grow from 100 to 6000 people in six years—while making substantial changes in the church's theology and governance!

Matt, you're quick to give the credit to the fact that the Village's congregation was already open to whatever it would take to become a church that was leading new people to Christ.

I can't emphasize that strongly enough. The chairman of our elders [Ed. Moving this Southern Baptist church from deacon- to elder-leadership was just one of the transformations.] sat down with me and said, "If you'll preach the Word and people get saved, you can change anything you want." That's the story. The story's not me, the story is those guys.

Even in a small church, it seems likely that the feeling wasn't unanimous. How did you roll out your changes?

There were a lot of older people in the church, and here's what I did not do: I did not walk into that place and beat up old saints and demand that our way was our way and they could just deal with it. I'm mortified at how often it plays out that way. And I don't know what young guys think they're doing; I don't know how they think they're pleasing God by beating up people who have been nothing but faithful to Him.

So first I started taking all these old guys out—to coffee, lunch, and dinner—and the message I communicated over and over again was the same: We need you, we need you, we need you. I immediately started putting 20 year-olds together with older folks. "Hey, this guy can show you how to live life; he can teach you about the Bible, he will have you into his home…" There's a hunger among twenty-somethings for that type of mentorship. And at that point the old saints don't care about peripheral things any more. They're not arguing about music and style and whether I'm wearing jeans or not any more.

So instead of trying to come in and trumpet your change while throwing away the past, you celebrate the past.

Absolutely! Because here's what young guys don't know and I think they've got to learn: VBS might not work anymore—there are some young guys who believe that. Well you'd better handle that with care because the reality is there's a lot of people in your church whose lives were changed in VBS and their children were saved at VBS. So when you come in and mock it or kill it without doing the background work first, you are, in a way, attacking the spiritual experience of your people. It's unacceptable.

When you change the music, when you change the style of dress, when you change things from the past, you're attacking a world view that wrought real change in people's lives. So you've got to be able to manage change while at the same time celebrating what God did before you. That's the fine line for the leader to walk. Honor the past while pushing forward into the future. Sometimes that's tricky, and you're going to lose people. People are still going to fight you. They're going to say ill of you. But you won't lose as many of them if you honor the past. "Yes, this was an amazing thing. We think, though, that this would be a better way to try it. If not, then let's come back and rethink it."

I know young guys that are like, "I don't know why they get so upset about that." Well, dummy, because their kids got saved at VBS, and now you're saying it's illegitimate. It's not illegitimate, it's just maybe time for another tool.

You moved your church from Armenian to Reformed and from egalitarian to complementarian. Those are sweeping transformations. What was your technique for easing the change?

If there's a new idea or a shift we roll it out like this. We meet with all our staff, we discuss it, we let them push back on it, and then we rebuild it. We roll it out to all our leaders, teachers, home-group leaders, ministry leaders, their apprentices, and we roll it out again. We let them push on it and chisel away at it, and then finally roll it out. Our leadership is never hearing for the first time some shift in philosophy or theology.

So when I started teaching the kind of doctrinal pillars that we teach at The Village, the sticky one was the role of women. So what I did on that is I first taught just our leaders and then on a Wednesday night I invited anyone in the church who wanted to hear and ask questions to come in. I did an hour and a half teaching on the role of women. I took any question and answered it. We recorded the whole thing and I made a CD for everyone in the church. That next Sunday morning I said I was going to start to teach on it but on your way out, be sure to grab a CD. So now there can't be whispers, there can't be people saying "Well, Chandler thinks all the women should just shut their mouths and get pregnant and cook me a sandwich." They can't say that because anyone who actually listened to it could go, "That's not what he said." And then we started to teach it.

So the plan is always to see where the opposition is going to come from, and try to get everybody on board before we roll out, so that as it rolls out I don't have to defend it, because our leaders are defending it.

Matt Chandler, senior pastor of The Village church in Highland Village and Denton, Texas.